The result was a list­ing of 20 some pack­ages. I then upgraded each them, one at a time, with pac­man –S
, leav­ing filesys­tem to the end, along with bash and glibc.

So far so good. I updated bash. No prob­lems. Then I updated glibc…

/usr/bin/locale-gen: /bin/sh: bad interpreter

That isn’t promis­ing. So I tried to run /bin/sh, and it wasn’t there. Not only was /bin/sh gone, but the entire /bin direc­tory was gone. I poked around and found bash, sh, and the other usual sus­pects in /usr/bin. I cre­ated a sys­link for /bin -> /usr/bin with: ln –s /usr/bin /bin

Then I ran pac­man –S glibc and it worked. Next up filesys­tem. Same error as before, except this time it was just on /bin. I removed the sym­link, updated filesys­tem, and every­thing was in har­mony once again. The filesys­tem pack­age will actu­ally cre­ate /bin -> /usr/bin and /sbin -> /usr/bin so that all of your scripts will con­tinue to func­tion when you call #!/bin/bash at the top.

True to form, I didn’t come across this post by Arch Linux until after I’d writ­ten this blog entry. Take a look for another method of solv­ing the problem.